


Earth Girls, Amazon Women and Other Space Creatures

by Princess of Geeks (Princess)



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Character Study, Character of Color, F/M, First Time, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-16
Updated: 2010-03-16
Packaged: 2017-10-08 00:59:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/71072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Princess/pseuds/Princess%20of%20Geeks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Sam and Teal'c got together. Focus on Sam's slowly growing awareness of how she has come to care for him so deeply, and on his grappling with Earth customs regarding women's roles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Earth Girls, Amazon Women and Other Space Creatures

**Author's Note:**

  * For [crazedturkey](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=crazedturkey).



> Written for the 2009 Teal'c Ficathon on Live Journal. Thanks to Jane Davitt for beta duties.

From the moment Teal'c had stepped through the Tau'ri's gate with the other refugees from Chulak, O'Neill had watched him carefully.

Teal'c had anticipated this and did not find it upsetting. It was only to be expected that the Tau'ri would be suspicious of a traitor, even one who had fought on their side, and would want to gather information about him. What had surprised him, what had touched him, was O'Neill's instantaneous trust. And thus he tried to return it, and to be worthy of it.

From that day, when he had joined his own private fight to that of the Tau'ri, he had accepted O'Neill's leadership, and with it, his watchful eye. He came to believe in O'Neill's trust in his loyalty, and he came to appreciate O'Neill's taciturn ways, his humor, and his excellent mentoring skills. Which, of course, was why the joke Teal'c had shared with Bra'tac about O'Neill being his apprentice had been rich and enjoyable for so long.

One of his earliest lessons from O'Neill, delivered, as always, in as few words as possible, concerned the female warriors of the SGC.

"Treat 'em the same," O'Neill stressed, one evening not long after Teal'c had been liberated from his status as prisoner of war. O'Neill, hands in pockets, his comment deceptively offhand and casual, warned, "Just ignore everything but the mission. The job at hand is all that matters."

And this Teal'c strove to do. It was one command among many.

^^^^

Life in the Stargate program was an endless catalog of wonders, a science fiction novel come to life, and accepting an alien warrior, a former enemy, on their still-solidifying team hadn't been the weirdest, or hardest, thing Sam had done to date in the course of her deployment. She'd gotten kind of proud of her ability to repeatedly get tossed in the deep end and swim. But occasionally, the water felt really, really cold.

One day O'Neill chased her down in the parking lot, calling, in that command voice that wasn't loud, but pitched to carry: "Carter. Carter, wait up."

She turned. The sun was just coming up, but they'd been off world on another sun's clock, and she had that gritty up-all-night feeling, and she wasn't sure how many hours it had been since they'd gone through the gate, but day or night in Colorado, she knew what she needed most right then was sleep.

O'Neill said, "Tell me something." He paused, standing there in the gathering light in his bomber jacket, fiddling with his truck keys. He had to be as tired as she was, but he didn't look it. He looked restless, and he didn't want to meet her eyes. "If I needed you to... If we have to double up, if we're somewhere overnight, are you comfortable sharing a tent with Teal'c?"

"Of course, sir," she said. The answer had to be automatic. Why would he even ask her this? She bristled, and then tried not to. It couldn't matter, who she bunked with. Why did it matter? Why did he have to make it matter? Like the fucking locker rooms. It shouldn't matter.

O'Neill looked off at the horizon, frowning. He said, "Under normal circumstances," and then he stopped himself and laughed wryly. "What are those, right?" He cleared his throat. "I lean toward assigning you to Daniel and putting Teal'c with me, but I kind of want to keep an eye on Daniel for a while. Maybe you can keep an eye on T. for me."

"What kind of an eye, sir?" This didn't sound good, but at least it obviously wasn't the "women in the military" thing. Again. O'Neill, she had to admit, had not fallen into that trap. Yet.

O'Neill frowned. "Well, it's like this. Teal'c felt it was important to tell us both, just now, me and Daniel, I mean, that he'd been the one to select Daniel's wife as the host of that snake. That it was his fault she was captured." O'Neill looked down and kicked at a bit of gravel that had worked itself loose of the asphalt. Sam swallowed and tried to fight back the revulsion that always threatened to overtake her when she thought too hard about what the Goa'uld actually did to the hosts. "And he said he came here, too, see, in the first wave -- the attack that made Hammond call me back." O'Neill looked at her then, a muscle in his jaw pulsing. "Teal'c told me that he, personally, grabbed Allen out of the gateroom."

"I see." Sam willed her face to calm. Willed herself to hold O'Neill's gaze.

O'Neill sighed and just stood there, just sharing the silence with her. The sun was coming up, the day going from gray to white around them.

Finally he looked down again. And again the keys jingled. "I still trust him, just as much as I did when I invited him back here with us. But it's got to be harder for Daniel now. And..." another wince, "you know all this is pretty personal for Daniel." He met her eyes again. "I'm gonna have to tell the general. But I wanted to tell you first."

"I see," she repeated, and sighed and squared her shoulders.

"Think it over, Carter."

She smiled, a harsh, wry, half a smile. "He was following his orders at the time, sir."

O'Neill squinted toward the rising sun. "Don't I know it.... I'm sure Daniel will see it that way too. Eventually. But seeing something and being okay with it are two different things."

"Very different."

"I still think we can make this work, and I know I'm the best team leader for Teal'c, but, just ... lemme know." He was going to go, then; he was turning away without another word.

"I can do it, Colonel," she said, and he stopped and looked back at her and nodded, still serious, but somehow, a little more relaxed, a little relieved, and then he kept walking, back toward the mountain, head down.

^^^^

Despite O'Neill's example, Teal'c was continually surprised by Captain Carter. His inability to predict her reactions made him feel uninformed and inexperienced. It was not a pleasant feeling for a former First Prime, a former commander of battalions.

Teal'c didn't show it, but he was intensely surprised, for example, on Simarka, when O'Neill allowed Captain Carter to complete her duel of honor with the chieftain. He had assumed O'Neill would step in for her and fight in her place.

But O'Neill did not. And Teal'c's surprise was an occasion of introspection for him when the mission was over.

At the time, on the planet, it would have been inappropriate and unnecessary for him to have revealed any reaction at all to the events. He was not expected to have an opinion. As a member of SG-1, his role was clear: He followed O'Neill's orders in battle, and beyond that, he felt it wise to always wait for O'Neill's guidance when the matter at hand was not something affecting Teal'c himself. And Teal'c well knew that when it came to Tau'ri customs, he still 'didn't know what he didn't know', as Daniel Jackson had once expressed.

Further, the degree of his surprise at the fight between Captain Carter and the Shavadai warlord had shown Teal'c the degree to which his instincts were still and probably always would be utterly Jaffa. His own culture did not train female warriors; thus, he did not expect to see women fight, and his daily exposure to the reality of Captain Carter at his side on SG-1 had not yet wiped out this ingrained reaction.

Captain Carter fought bravely and well, and prevailed. And if O'Neill, at Teal'c's shoulder, held his breath the entire time, his calm, watchful expression never wavered.

The experience made Teal'c resolve to examine more closely his prejudices. His instincts could lead him to costly mistakes if they prompted him to act inappropriately, or to continue to fail to predict Captain Carter's likely behavior, or O'Neill's. The duel on Simarka had brought home to him again that acceptance was not the same thing as understanding.

^^^^

Teal'c could tell immediately that O'Neill was every bit as observant as Daniel Jackson, in his own way, despite their extremely different backgrounds. And just as Teal'c was judging Earth's customs, he was sure that O'Neill had keenly observed, then drawn his own conclusions, about Jaffa society and Jaffa women, during the days when O'Neill became privy to Teal'c's shameful failure as a husband to Drey'auc.

O'Neill never lectured him about it. Bra'tac would have.

And as the months went by, O'Neill rarely asked about her, even before the mission that resulted in her rescue and relocation along with Ry'ac to the Land of Light. Yet O'Neill always, without fail, asked about Ry'ac, and even pressed small gifts upon Teal'c for the boy, when Teal'c announced his intention to visit.

^^^^

Sam was last through the gate when they came back from Vorash. Because of her dad, she tried very hard -- harder than the colonel was able to -- to give the Tok'ra the benefit of the doubt, but she couldn't deny that the wheels within wheels of the new double-agent plot that Anise was attempting with the Goa'uld that had been Shau'nac's symbiote had shaken Sam deeply.

It was a chilling thing to see something that ruthless, up close.

Sam banged down the ramp, wincing at the noise of her boots, trying to walk softly. All her nerves felt scraped raw. In front of her, O'Neill and Daniel had slowed, but Teal'c nodded at the general and kept going, stalking toward the side door of the gate room, handing his staff weapon to the armorer without a word, and without a glance behind him at the team.

The colonel stopped beside Hammond, blew out a breath and exchanged rueful glances with Daniel. Teal'c had been through a lot. The death of Shau'nac, the extremely dangerous encounters with his own symbiote. Sam was willing to cut him a great deal of slack in coming days.

"Blind spots," O'Neill muttered to Daniel. "We've all got 'em."

^^^^

Learning about women among the Tau'ri was like tracing back ripples in water to see where the stone had dropped. Or like tracking -- untangling competing, confusing footprints, and even following false trails to dead ends, before being able to reevaluate the relative importance of ever-shifting bits of data, winnowing the important from the irrelevant.

Teal'c, on the rare occasions when he, Daniel Jackson and Colonel O'Neill spent leisure time together, added to his fund of observations of women of the Tau'ri who were not part of the military, and in doing so, understood why O'Neill had watched him so closely in the beginning, and had made it a point to warn him about Tau'ri standards of equity between the sexes. At least in the military.

He was never allowed to mingle freely with the people of Colorado Springs, or the communities near Area 51, even after years of serving as an equal on the team. He could not let this rankle. Regulations required that someone from his team accompany him at all times when he was away from the base. He learned, by necessity, to accept it, and to also accept and in time come to be grateful for Daniel Jackson and O'Neill's polite reticence in not, as O'Neill would put it, 'rubbing his nose in it.'

And he slowly learned that Earth had a bewildering variety of allowable behavior among people, among women and men, outside the structure of the military.

The military rules made the most sense to him, and yet Teal'c felt pleased that he had been able to see the battles in the ring of jello for himself.

And by then, he knew enough to smile understandingly when O'Neill said to him, "Better not tell Carter about the wrestling, yeah?"

^^^^

It was only much later, long after the events in question, that Teal'c realized he could date with certainty the beginning of his true friendship with Major Samantha Carter. While they had known each other well, served together and fought together for a handful of intense and difficult years, their friendship began on a particular day during that painful time after the death of Drey'ac, when Daniel Jackson was among the ascended and O'Neill was missing in action, as the Tau'ri called it, with Harry Maybourne.

He had come to respect and trust her during the years of serving with her under O'Neill. But he would not have called them friends until that day.

That day there were tears on Major Carter's calm and intelligent face, and her voice broke under the weight of their losses, and she surprised him again: She unhesitatingly turned to him when he, hesitantly, offered comfort.

Moved by some impulse he didn't fully explore, he had sought her out, followed her where he was sure no one else would, presuming, perhaps, and bending etiquette. But although he did not articulate it at the time, not even to himself, he was compelled to reach out to her as a teammate, as a friend, at that time. Because the two of them, in that moment, were alone. Profoundly, uniquely alone.

He offered, and she accepted. She hugged him, and he held her close, sitting on the hard bench in the chill, dank locker room. Her tears were warm on his skin and he was glad that she could find catharsis in that way.

She cried on his shoulder for a few minutes, a shorter time that he would have allowed, and then she pulled away first, and he left her there, to seek, as she always did, a renewal of her calm in private.

^^^^

Most of Teal'c's stuff ended up in storage on Level 12. He had a bigger room now than he'd had before General O'Neill had pulled every string he had to pull to get Teal'c his own place off base. But he'd had an entire apartment full of decorations and furniture and dishes and it wouldn't all fit in quarters, nor was it even all needed. Because the base quarters didn't have kitchens.

Sam found this all to be really, really sad, and really frustrating, and there was not one goddamned thing she could do about it except smile, and carry boxes, and smile, and sort knickknacks, and pat Teal'c's shoulder, and carry more boxes.

Teal'c was quiet all day, saying only, of course, what was needed, as she and Daniel and a couple of airmen hauled boxes up and down, and finally pared down and separated out all the stuff in a manageable way.

Along toward evening, Teal'c was arranging candles on a wall-mounted iron thing, carefully, methodically, as if he had all the time in the world, when Daniel said, "I'm going to go get us some carry-out from the commissary."

Teal'c turned, and opened his mouth to speak, but Daniel said, "No, no, I've got it -- you keep working on that. It'll just take me a second and I need some coffee anyway."

Teal'c nodded and turned back to the candles.

Sam bit her lip. She was crouched behind the entertainment center, plugging in the DVD player and the new, smaller speakers. She felt torn, wanting to help Daniel, but she wasn't at a stopping place.

Teal'c's DVD collection was extensive, and it was all in here, all carefully shelved already. Daniel had done that. He'd alphabetized the movies and the documentaries by title. She would have grouped them by genre.

She finished plugging in the last cable, and crawled out, and brushed off her slacks out of habit even though the place was still spotless, the empty space freshly scrubbed by the mountain staff, when they'd gotten the word that Teal'c had been ordered back. Then Teal'c helped her move the unit back toward the wall. They didn't crush any cables.

She sat down on the floor and linked her arms around her knees as Teal'c stood there, turning on the set, muting the sound, exploring the cable connection and the channels he had. When he spoke, he didn't turn.

"Colonel Carter, I made a crucial error in judgment that I wish you to know I am aware of."

"It's okay, Teal'c. You don't have to--"

He went on as if she had not spoken. "My error lay in treating the people I met in my apartment complex as if they were as dedicated and trustworthy as our team."

Sam pursed her lips and looked down, turning the screwdriver she held over and over in her hands. She was his CO. He needed to confess. She would listen. It was hard to turn off the instinctive reactions that came out of friendship, let alone the ones that came out of her never-entirely-buried awareness of him as a man. But she needed to make this all about listening, about being the superior officer. She bit her lip, pushing down the stray thought of how hilarious it really was that she had ended up commanding T. and Daniel both. First among equals, really. Yeah, she gave the orders and it was her team on paper, but it was so not about that now. It took effort, but she settled her spooling thoughts. Teal'c's foray into life off base had ended so so badly. She was touched, actually, that he wanted to talk to her. The urge to put a hand on his arm was strong, but she stifled it.

"I was too trusting." Teal'c clicked off the television and turned away to light the candles he'd previously placed in the wrought iron rack on the wall.

Sam didn't want to say that she'd noticed that Teal'c seemed to have a lousy track record with women. Instead, she said, "We've all done it. You remember my history with Jonas Hanson. You've got nothing to be ashamed of."

Teal'c turned to her. "I am not ashamed. Krista James was fully within her rights to kill the man who was abusing her. He was a coward and a bully and I am, in fact, proud that it was I who gave her the skills she needed to fight back." His gaze shifted to the corner of the room. "But she was not honest with me."

Sam frowned. "You would have still helped her if she had told you straight out that she'd killed him."

"Of course. I would have helped her face the consequences through the police system. As you saw, she had an excellent chance of acquittal. If she had thought that through, she need not have run."

Sam met his troubled gaze. "You wanted to help her."

"Yes, and she trusted me ... yet not enough to be honest with me."

"She was scared. Maybe given her history, she didn't trust anyone."

"Indeed," Teal'c said, and then Daniel was knocking, with styrofoam boxes of chicken and mashed potatoes and cups of coffee, and they picnicked on Teal'c's floor, and the general joined them after an hour or so. Just like old times.

^^^^

She and Teal'c sat in lawn chairs for a long time, watching the campfire on the beach at Jack's place, the fire making a ring of warmth in the cooling evening. Jack had excused himself first and gone to bed. If she turned her head she could see the light in the little corner bedroom that meant Daniel was still up, reading.

This was maybe the fourth time the old SG-1 had all come up here together, and she was more touched than she knew how to say whenever Jack made it a point to invite them all again. Things had changed so much, but the bond among the four of them was strong as ever. Undamaged as ever.

She watched the firelight playing on Teal'c's face and tilted her head, thinking. She always wondered what _he_ was thinking, always wondered what he made of them all -- silly, impetuous, undisciplined Tau'ri. But that wasn't true, either. Teal'c, she'd learned through the years, was an unpredictable combination of restraint and passion. She shivered at the thought. It was crossing a line, of sorts, to think of him that way, but she'd grown so close to him through the years that it didn't seem outrageous or even impossible. Just a little... impolite? Presumptuous.

She shifted in her chair a little, getting a different angle on his profile, and really watched him. Was it so impossible now? How would it go, if it weren't impossible? Lotta water under the bridge, Jack would say....

And Daniel? He'd observe: To understand all is to forgive all.

As if he felt her gaze, Teal'c turned and met her eyes. She didn't look away, or school her expression. She wondered what he saw there.

After a few moments, he turned his head again, regal as ever, to silently observe the fire. But if she looked closely, she could tell he was just about, just maybe almost thinking about, smiling.

^^^^

First there were roses. A dozen deep-red roses, delivered to her desk every now and then. No card, nothing. But she knew who they were from.

And one night when she happened to run into Teal'c at the entrance to the mountain -- by chance? Or not by chance? Who could say? -- and they went to grab dinner together in town, she knew she was not alone in feeling the subtle change to the rhythm of the conversation, or the vibe.

They knew each other so well. But she'd never let that particular kind of laugh, or lingering gaze, seep into her interactions with him.

Two more dinners like that, arranged seemingly by chance, and then, organically, the evening came when she took him to her house instead of driving them back to the mountain.

"I spent a lot of years needing to do the right thing. The career-building thing. That was a lot of years being cautious," she said to him, when it would have been clear from the route she was taking that she wasn't heading for the mountain. She could feel him listening. "I'm not worried about that any more. For me, this isn't running to anything, or from anything. It's just something.... real."

Teal'c didn't immediately respond. She glanced his way. The slightest frown creased the space between his eyebrows. He was thinking. The pause stretched out, and she drove, content to wait.

Finally he said, "You are a scientist first, I have observed. Scientists are chiefly interested in reality, are they not."

"We try," Sam said, chuckling. They pulled up to her house, and she parked the Volvo by the curb and got out. Without seeming to hurry, he was at the gate before she was, pushing it open on its well-oiled hinges.

She paused, and then she reached up and cupped his cheek, something she'd never done in just that way before. His skin was so warm. She had to stretch to bring her mouth to his, and his hand splayed against the small of her back, steadying her as she went to tiptoes.

The kiss was soft, and familiar, and probably one of the most solid, sanest things she'd ever done.

"Come on," she said, grinning at him, and brushed by to lead the way to the house.

He didn't say anything, but easily caught her up, walking beside her, putting his arm around her waist.

end.


End file.
